Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 12:11:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Ka-Ping Yee <kryee@novice.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Re: Possible use of <INSERT> - serious inquiry
To: Murray Altheim <murray@spyglass.com>
Cc: MegaZone <megazone@livingston.com>, www-html@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <v02110100ad746c91d155@[140.186.34.50]>
Message-Id: <Pine.3.87.9603191232.A32135-0100000@novice.uwaterloo.ca>
On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Murray Altheim wrote:
> A valid HTML document is of the form:
>
> <!DOCTYPE ...>
> <HTML>
> <TITLE>...</TITLE>
> <BODY>
> ...
> </BODY>
> </HTML>
>
> To insert another valid HTML document anywhere in this structure
> invalidates the document, unless the inserted entity is a document fragment
> and it is allowed at the inserted location. I don't think I've ever seen
> any proposed resolution to this problem, where in practice folks will
> probably simply insert complete HTML documents. It would be a royal mess,
> as it puts a heavy requirement on authors to do their own entity
> management, something I've seldom seen in practice.
Although, as another reply to this thread says, actual insertion
of data into the stream to be validated is not always necessary,
i did propose a resolution to the validation problem on this list
a while ago.
My suggestion was to add a SRC attribute to some carefully-chosen
element(s) which would allow both the includer and includee to be
properly validated, even if one or the other is unavailable. E.g.:
Company home page:
text text text
<hr>
<p id="boilerplate">Copyright 1996 by Foobar Inc.
blah blah blah...
blah blah blah...</p>
Other pages on the company's site:
text text text
<p src="index.html#boilerplate"></p>
Everything still validates this way on its own. In addition,
as long as the includee validates correctly, the includer is almost
certain to validate correctly when the includee is inserted.
Moreover, since the home page is likely to have been already
visited and cached, subsequent inclusions will not require any
extra requests.
I'd suggest maybe <P> or <DIV> to perform this task.
Ping (Ka-Ping Yee): 3A Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada
kryee@csclub.uwaterloo.ca, St. Paul's College, Waterloo N2L 3G5, 519 7258008
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